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But still, as the Mul-Torch burned lower and I yet encountered no sign of the Golden beetle, my thoughts turned ever and again to the still form of Vika lying in the cavern of the Golden beetle. It had been weeks since I had last seen her and I supposed it would have been at least days since she had been closed in the tunnels of the Golden beetle. How was it that she had been captured only so recently by the creature? And if it were true that she had been captured only recently how would she have managed to live in the caverns for those days? Perhaps she might have found a sump of water but what would there have been to eat, I wondered? Perhaps, I told myself, she, like the Slime Worm, would have been forced to scavenge on the previous kills of the beetle but I found this hard to believe, for the condition of her body did not suggest an ugly, protracted, degrading battle with the worms of starvation. And how was it, I asked myself, that the Golden beetle had not already feasted on the delicate flesh of the proud beauty of Treve? And I wondered on the five strange protuberances that nested so grotesquely in her lovely body. And Misk had said to me he thought I would be too late for it was near hatching time. A cry of horror from the bottom of my heart broke from my lips in that dark passage and I turned and raced madly back down the path I had come. Time and time again I stumbled against outcroppings of rock and bruised my shoulders and thighs but never once did I diminish my speed in my headlong race back to the cavern of the Golden beetle. - (Priest-Kings of Gor, Chapter )